News and Announcements

February 25, 2011: Dr. Paula Szkody (University of Washington) has requested our help in monitoring the cataclysmic variable SDSS074545 (SDSS J074531.91+453829.5) for upcoming Hubble Space Telescope observations. The HST observations are scheduled to be made during the week of 2011 March 7-14. Dr. Szkody also observed this object with HST in October-November 2007 (see AAVSO Alert Notice 359).

The 2009 Landolt UBVRI Equatorial Standard Fields are being added to VSP. Descriptions of all the fields are included in the tables below. In order to plot them you need to enter the coordinates and size of the field you want.

On Feburary 19, 2011 the number of observations in the AAVSO International Database surpassed the 20 million mark. It is fitting that this milestone was achieved during our 100th anniversary. Below is some information about the achievement.

A milestone anniversary and a joint meeting with the AAS!

May 21-26, 2011
Boston, MA

Some observers in the chat room are reporting that their observations submitted since November 11, 2010 are not showing up in our online tools. Doc and Matt will investigate this first thing in the morning (eastern) and update this page when they know more information. We apologize for this inconvenience.

February 1, 2011: Sumner Starrfield (Arizona State University) has informed us that Chandra is currently observing the cataclysmic variable T Pyx. He and his colleagues would like supporting optical monitoring of the star during the visitation. One visit is happening now; the next and final visit will occur on February 5 (UT).

This Monday, 31 January 2011, at 12:00ET (17:00UTC) the AAVSO Website will be down for one hour to look into the installation of a Wide Area Network Router which, if successful, will combine the two internet feeds we have here at HQ into one which will allow us to seamlessly increase both our incomming and outgoing data rates.

Any questions or concerns can be sent to Doc Kinne at rkinne @ aavso.org.

Early in 2010, he was made Assistant Director of the AAVSO. Later that year we celebrated his defending his Ph.D. But something more unusual, at least for an AAVSO staffer, was on the horizon.

It would seem to an outside observer, perhaps, that AAVSO staffers are more committed to their work than most. While most of us (but not all) are married, the vast majority of us have no children now. With the single exception of Gloria, those that do have children have grown children.

We received some sad news at the AAVSO ten days ago regarding one of the participants in the AAVSO's project to digitize data from the Harvard Annals. Daniel Rupp wrote me to let me know that his son, Andrew Rupp, passed away on January 7, 2011. Along with this news, Mr. Rupp passed along the spreadsheets that Andrew had in progress. All told, Andrew digitized more than 2700 observations for 10 different Mira variables, extending our light curves for these stars backwards in time by nearly eleven years.

January 11, 2011: Dr. Kirill Sokolovsky (Max-Planck-Institut fuer Radioastronomie, Bonn) has requested the assistance of AAVSO observers to obtain optical photometry of the blazar-type quasars 3C 273 and 3C 279 during 2011. The observations obtained by AAVSO observers will be combined with multiwavelength observations - from radio to gamma-rays - as well as with very long baseline interferometry with the VLBA to obtain a better picture of what these objects are and how they vary.

January 8, 2011: Dr. Michael David Hicks (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) contacted the AAVSO requesting precision
photometry of three solar system objects in support of NASA's DAWN mission to Vesta. These objects, called
"Vestoids", are near-Earth objects with similar reflectance spectra to Vesta itself, suggesting they may be fragments
of that larger body.